Music: Popular Piano

Liberace (pronounced Liber-ah-chee) is a piano player who dropped his given names because “Paderewski did not achieve worldwide fame until after he dropped his.”* The trick took: at 33, Milwaukee-born Wladziu Valentino Liberace cannot give enough concerts to please all his fans, many of whom probably never heard of Paderewski. He has sold a phenomenal 250,000 albums of his records, appears on 100 TV stations (more than I Love Lucy), and by the testimony of his sponsors (mostly banks and biscuit companies) has directly accounted for “several million dollars worth of business.”

Older Liberace fans insist that he reminds them of Rudolph Valentino, which is doubly odd: Valentino was not the pianist type, and, far from looking like the lean, dark actor, Liberace is pudgy, his curly hair is greying, his brow is broad. And he is not the strong, silent type. At a typical performance, he sits at the grand piano on a darkened stage with a 25-piece orchestra behind him and a discreet candelabra near by. He flashes a dazzling smile at the crowd, waves and mugs, squints up into the balcony and gushes into a convenient microphone, “Ooh look, there are people way up there!”

Traditionally trained but popularly inclined, Liberace toured the nightclubs for ten years. A year and a half ago, he discovered a larger market, has been carving a high-paying swath across the U.S. pop concert circuit ever since. In Los Angeles, his was the only concert of the year to fill the Hollywood Bowl (capacity: 20,000). In New Orleans, he signed autographs for 2½ hours after the concert was over. In Chicago, the Civic Opera House sold out four days after his concert was announced, had to schedule two more. Outside Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall last week, women unable to get tickets turned away from the box office in tears.

In the hall, his audience was, as usual, two-thirds women, from bobby-soxers to grandmothers. They basked happily as his performances washed over them: folk songs, show tunes and his own arrangements of such classics as Debussy’s Clair de Lime and Grieg’s Concerto, most of which he played with artfully simplified fingerwork in the frillier runs. For a topper, he opened up his laryngitic baritone in a perennial favorite of the middleaged, September Song. When it was all over, he dangled his feet over a corner of the stage, signed his pictures, shook hands and accepted embraces from some of the more grandmotherly.

Liberace himself is not quite sure where his appeal lies, and it doesn’t bother him. His aim: “To be to the piano what Bing Crosby is to the voice.” Another aim: to finish his new home in Royal Oaks, Calif., where he, his brother and his mother can live, and swim in their pool, which is shaped like a grand piano viewed from the second balcony.

-Ignace Jan.